Can Pope Leo XIV reunify Catholics and help a troubled world?
The first American Pope faces enormous challenges, not least the deep divisions within the church. But make no mistake – in style, probably in substance, this Pope is a serious course correction from the chaos of the Francis years.
Pope Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Prevost, the first American to be pope, is a magical choice embodying a thousand firsts.
The scene when his name was revealed and he came out on to the papal balcony, the 267th Pope, to address the crowds was majestic. All the ritual and ceremony, all the grandeur and continuity, and yet all the popular touch – the church of the masses with thousands thronging St Peter’s Square to catch a glimpse of the new Pope – of an institution that has stood in storms and trials of every kind for 2000 years was there.
The first American to occupy the chair of Peter, he was not well known as an individual to the crowds, but they loved him as their new Pope.
“Viva il Papa, ole, ole ole.”
Two things stood out. His address invoked God first. Social justice, the challenges of the church, the call to humanity around the globe – these all figured in his short address. But most of all he spoke in the words of Christ: “Peace be with you.”
The other striking thing was that he chose traditional papal garments, unlike Francis who had eschewed them in a gesture of simplicity.
We shouldn’t read too much into that, but it’s a gesture towards tradition, Catholic identity, the deepest institutional continuity, almost a kindness to traditional Catholics.
The new Pope faces enormous challenges, not least the deep divisions within the church that grew under the long reign of Francis. Naturally he also invoked Francis. But make no mistake. In style, probably in substance, this Pope is a serious course correction from the chaos of the Francis years.
It seems in the conclave of 133 cardinals that elected him, both the liberals and the conservatives had a blocking minority. A doctrinal revolutionary who might have completed Francis’s revolution, or an arch-conservative who might have attempted a full restoration, couldn’t get the necessary two-thirds majority.
So the conclave did what conclaves often do. It chose compromise. Prevost was born and grew up in Chicago. His ancestry is partly Spanish, partly Creole, with a touch of African-American. He studied mathematics and philosophy before joining the Augustinian order of Catholic priests. He gained degrees in theology and canon law. That alone marks him as a great departure from Francis, who was impatient with canon law.
Leo was a missionary in Peru for nearly two decades, serving as a parish priest, a seminary lecturer and a bishop. He became the global head of the Augustinians before Francis made him a cardinal and appointed him head of the office that chooses bishops around the world.
He took Peruvian citizenship and was a dual national. He’s an authentically global Catholic, reflecting the church’s universalism. He knows the global south in his finger tips, he also knows the American church, and the difficulties of Vatican governance. He unites the global south and the global north, the intrigues of the Vatican and the missionary fields of Peru, the global reach of bishops in every field of the church.
Francis was a Jesuit. There’s something fit about an Augustinian succeeding a Jesuit. It’s said that history gives us a fat pope, then a skinny pope, a tall pope, then a short pope, as each conclave tends not to replicate the pope just gone but to balance him, sometimes even to chart a modest course correction.
The Jesuits are sometimes called the church’s politicians. The Augustinians are known as the church’s intellectuals. The differences in style between the new and old popes will be hugely important.
Francis was charismatic, the master of gesture, but he was also garrulous and undisciplined in his remarks, with the Vatican often having to correct and retract his odd and often self-contradictory statements. Francis too, though genuinely compassionate for the poor, was bad-tempered and didn’t like to be contradicted.
Famously, he hadn’t conducted a meeting of cardinals since 2014 – an extraordinary situation in the modern church. This was partly because he didn’t like cardinals disagreeing with him on points of theology and moral teaching. And he was said to be scared that a group of cardinals might come and see him and ask him to resign.
As far as we can see, the new Pope will not be at all like that. He’s famously a particularly good listener, attentive and deeply present with people who are talking to him.
There will be endless attention on the new Pope’s politics. That’s understandable but a bit of a mistake. American Bishop Robert Barron, of the Word on Fire mission, regarded as the most effective communicator in the modern church, argued just before the election that the new Pope had to emphasise and prioritise the supernatural in the church.
“The most important consideration in electing a pope,” Barron said, “is to choose someone who can proclaim the message of the risen Jesus effectively.”
Barron went on to argue that far from there being a contradiction between the supernatural dimension of faith and a living concern for social justice, the two go hand-in-hand. A church that is concerned first with the supernatural is then more effective in giving witness, and aid, in the world.
Barron didn’t cite her but Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who took her name in honour of Therese of Lisieux, a contemplative French nun who in her short life virtually never left the convent, was inspired to a life of heroic service to the poorest people because of her love of Jesus.
Father Damien of Molokai ministered to lepers in 19th-century Hawaii no one else would go near, because of his love of God. He dressed people’s wounds and he taught them about the gospel. His close association with lepers led him to contract leprosy and die from the disease himself.
Many Catholics thought Francis too taken up with politics. Not only that, as cardinal George Pell argued in one of two serious critiques of the Francis papacy he wrote, the intellectual quality of papal writings declined. Partly as a result, partly because Francis had such an aversion to systematic thinking and the normal processes of church teaching, papal influence, in Pell’s view, declined.
Francis aligned himself completely with the global left, but it’s not clear he had any normative effect on Western politics, and he had no effect at all within the tyrannies such as China and Russia, which he never criticised.
The new Pope is also progressive politically but his temper is completely different from that of Francis. Also, he seems to be a moderate progressive. He has rightly described as problematic elements of Donald Trump’s attitudes to immigration, specifically those policies in the first Trump presidency that briefly saw children separated from parents.
Traditional Catholic social teaching has always held that immigrants should be treated with respect and kindness, certainly with respect for their innate human dignity, for each of them is an imago dei, an image of God. But traditional Catholic social teaching also holds that nations are entitled to secure their borders.
Similarly, the new Pope made a measured criticism of a position that US Vice-President JD Vance argued. Vance held that human love starts with the family, goes out to the nation and then finally to foreigners, with each category of love weakening the further it is from every human being. The then cardinal Prevost disagreed with Vance, saying Jesus preached instead a universal love, which should not prioritise categories of human beings, which is not of course to deny the special affection anyone has for their own family.
However, the new Pope is unlikely to make correcting the Trump administration the priority that Francis strangely seemed to assign to this task.
Not only that, the new Pope has plenty of traditional Catholic views with which conservative Catholics will identify.
He is a strong opponent of abortion and in the past criticised Hillary Clinton by name for her extreme pro-abortion position. A Pope who, being an American, has naturally commented on the American scene in the past, and politely criticises Trump and Clinton by name for actions that he thinks transgress sound moral behaviour, sounds like an authentically Catholic Pope.
The new Pope also has written of his opposition to modern gender ideology and his opposition to having that taught in schools. Gender ideology, he argues, at best creates confusion because “it seeks to create genders that don’t exist”.
He will certainly proclaim continuity with Francis, but anyone who was elected pope, even had it been a more forthright conservative, would do that.
Pope John Paul II, whom I’d regard as the greatest pope in hundreds of years, took the names of his three immediate predecessors: Pope Paul VI, Pope John XXIII, and Pope John Paul I. Yet his pontificate, in style, manner and even in many ways substance, was radically different from all three.
Of course there were also continuities. But each pope brings his own personality, his own history, insights, background and distinctive priorities, to the position. No pope is ever a carbon copy of the previous pope. Most, as I say, tend to represent a conscious departure from their immediate predecessor.
The new Pope does share Francis’s concern about climate change. And he certainly shares a missionary outreach to all marginalised people, whether they be marginalised by living in poverty in the global south, or under tyranny in China or Russia, or marginalised by racial or sexual identity within Western societies.
Like Francis, he will want the church to be universal and welcoming. The old adage of the church has been: come as you are. That does not imply, however, that you stay as you are, or that you continue in behaviour the church believes the gospels teach is wrong.
The choice of the papal name, Leo XIV, is fascinating and telling. It’s an obvious tribute to Pope Leo XIII, who was pope for 25 years, from 1878 until 1903. Indeed, Leo XIII was 69 when he was elected pope, just as Prevost is 69 now, and Leo XIII lived until he was 93.
This is one of the oddities of modern popes. The greatest recent pope, John Paul II, was a young, vigorous man in his 50s when he was elected pope. His sheer energy, his love of life, love of the gospel, of God and of people, sent an electrifying charge throughout the church and throughout the world.
Yet, naturally, it was a very long papacy, and in his last years he was disabled by Parkinson’s disease and was a shadow of his former self.
With modern medicine, and the abstemious lives that popes lead, notwithstanding the job’s huge stresses, popes typically live to be quite old.
The cardinals these days are reluctant to choose a young man because if they don’t like his papacy they’ve got to put with it for decades. It also means that almost certainly those who elect him will be too old to succeed him. That means, however, that the last years of a papacy are typically endured by a pope suffering the extreme illnesses that often precede death.
Leo XIII is most famously remembered for his landmark Rerum Novarum encyclical, which had the English title of Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour. It supported the rights of trade unionism and the need to give the working class a decent standard of living. But it plainly rejected socialism, as well as unreformed capitalism, and asserted the right to private property. It can be interpreted as the church finding a way to combat communism.
It was brilliantly written, closely argued and highly influential.
Hopefully, that doesn’t mean the new Pope will concentrate on politics rather than God. Leo XIII was also a deeply formed theologian.
Only in the past day or two was the new Pope’s name mentioned as a contender. In no sense did he enter the conclave as a favourite. He didn’t figure at all on most lists of likely popes.
Apart from everything else, he now has massive problems of Vatican governance to address.
He seems a wise, spiritual, moderate, self-effacing, reliable man who has loved God his whole life and served the church, and through the church all the people he could. It was thought the cardinals would never elect an American, never elect a citizen from the global superpower. But plainly they chose the man, not the accidents of his civic identity.
As leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, and the best known and most important religious leader on the planet, the new Pope now has the loneliest job in the world. So much now depends on him.
Leo means lion. He’ll need the heart of a lion, a lion who can lie down with the lambs.
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